The Bitcoin Cash Pre-Consensus Debate Continues

A few days ago news.Bitcoin.com reported on the debate between Bitcoin Cash (BCH) developers and community members concerning an idea called ‘pre-consensus.’ Some developers believe pre-consensus could help with block time speeds, zero-confirmation transactions, and consensus in general. Since then there’s been a lot of discussion about this topic, and some members of the BCH community with mining power, like Viabtc’s Haipo Yang, seemed to favor the idea of faster block times. While other miners, like Coingeek’s Calvin Ayre, have issues with the recent ideas that involve what they call “risky protocol changes.”

Bitcoin Cash and the Pre-Consensus Idea

Not long ago Bitcoin ABC client’s lead developer, Amaury Séchet, proposed the idea of pre-consensus to the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) community. The idea Séchet and other developers believe could make block times faster, help produce a more sound zero-confirmation system, and help with other consensus protocol changes. Right away Nchain’s chief scientist Craig Wright explained that he thinks pre-consensus is a horrible idea and “no hash goes to this crap.” Wright was not the only person who disagreed with the idea, and there have been many others who have written posts and comments about the concept in a negative light. However, this week Viabtc’s founder Haipo Yang had some positive statements to say about faster block times. On Twitter the Viabtc founder states:

I believe Bitcoin Cash should decrease the block time from 10 minutes to 1 minute. As a pool operator, I don’t see any technical problem and this will improve user experience very much.

Although again Nchain’s Wright immediately spoke out against it on Haipo Yang’s Twitter feed and said, “It will kill Bitcoin — It is a Poisson system. That makes the median time too low and the system stops scaling. It adds NOTHING — It makes the entire system fail and stop scaling — It is then not Bitcoin.” Wright continues:

No gain. No benefit. No value and a cap on growth, a change just for change sake without thinking and considering the long term. And, it is NO longer Bitcoin. Not BCH. It alters the reward, it alters the schedule. You make this change, you kill your pool. And for what — 1 min helps NOTHING when it comes to retail. Makes 0-conf no better. Increases the orphan rate 20-30x and kills it as cash.

Coingeek Refuses to Cooperate With “Risky Protocol Changes”

Another figure within the BCH community with mining power, Calvin Ayre has explained his pool will refuse to go along with a “risky protocol change.” Ayre’s Coingeek mining pool (17.8% of the network/ last 7 days) has become a behemoth among the top BCH miners and has close to as much, and sometimes more than, the hashrate as Viabtc today (17.4%). Coingeek has announced it is “taking a stand and urging the community not to proceed with risky protocol changes,” and the firm believes the move is short-term thinking. Coingeek’s stance is very much aligned with Nchain’s Wright, and Calvin Ayre has also made statements against the discussed protocol change.

“Coingeek believes in Bitcoin BCH and further believes it should fully restore the original Bitcoin protocol — It was unnecessary changes to BTC’s base protocol that forced the fork to Bitcoin Cash BCH, the only true Bitcoin,” Ayre states on July 23. “Now that we have Bitcoin Cash BCH, we should be focused on fully restoring it to be the original Bitcoin protocol, rather than making additions or more changes that take BCH away from the original protocol.”

Everything that needs to be done can be layered on top and retain the decade of proven security. I can assure the BCH community that our miners will never support anything that changes the battle-tested underlying original Bitcoin protocol — not with so many ways to do everything needed on top of this proven secure protocol. Many friends of mine in the Bitcoin BCH mining community are telling me they also support our position.

Other BCH Proponents Bolster Séchet’s Pre-Consensus Idea

Although, there are a lot of people who support Séchet’s idea of bringing pre-consensus to the upgrade table, and have bolstered the concept. News.Bitcoin.com previously mentioned that Bitcoin Unlimited’s chief scientist, Peter Rizun, likes pre-consensus but there are a bunch of others. Cornell professor ‏Emin Gün Sirer explains to his Twitter followers, “Reasonable voices are rightfully pointing out that Deadalnix’s (Amaury Séchet) pre-consensus idea is entirely optional, completely non-threatening to existing interests, and a sensible thing to do — One would have to be a divisive idiot to oppose it.”

Stash Wallet engineer Justus Ranvier says, “I don’t care how bad of an idea what Deadalnix is proposing may or not be. The relevant fact is that Craig Wright immediately jumped to, ‘I will use my patents to attack anyone who tries to implement this.’ That is unconditionally the wrong response.”

The BCH community has been discussing the whole debate fervently lately and its likely these discussions will continue. However many BCH proponents, whether they agree or disagree, believe that at least there is no censorship of ideas, and everyone is free to speak their mind about the pre-consensus subject and the many other topics discussed daily.

What do you think about the pre-consensus topic? What side do you agree with and why? Let us know your thoughts on this subject in the comment section below.

Images via Shutterstock, and Pixabay.

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Jamie Redman

Jamie Redman is a financial tech journalist living in Florida. Redman has been an active member of the cryptocurrency community since 2011. He has a passion for Bitcoin, open source code, and decentralized applications. Redman has written thousands of articles for news.Bitcoin.com about the disruptive protocols emerging today.

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